Dell Teases Inspiron Zino HD Mini PC Comments

Hmm. Well, 'desktop components' surely mean it's not Atom or CULV. A Phenom 'e' series on an ITX board perhaps?

the war of mini PC is getting heated up..

I love how teh eSATA ports are actually USB (I have a direct comparison of USB/eSATA combo port, eSATA only port and USB port... these are USB's), and the VGA one is a serial port (count the pins) :P

I'm hoping for a low-end Pentium or C2D, a G9400 chipset and a Blu-Ray drive. Now if there were only room for a half-height PCI-E expansion card, for a TV tuner, it would be ideal.

ion. they could be sneaky and claim "well, it was in a desktop once..."

the ion could accept a dual core atom, anyhow.

I reckon a serial port might end up being more likely than a VGA port in that hole. A lot of POS systems use serial interfaces, so maybe Dell want to target them as well.

@pimlicosound:
Whatever the chip is, it will need to be a low power design - spot the DC power jack, which means passively cooled external power supply.

@Chris: Silent PC Review ran a C2D E7200 on the Zotac 9300 mini-ITX board in the Antec ISK 300, which uses a tiny 65W external PSU.

http://www.silentpcreview.com/article959-page4.html

There's no reason Dell couldn't use a decent set of desktop components in this, provided they're cooled adequately.

@pimlicosound: Yep, that's the kind of thing I was referring to. Something with a 65W TDP or less anyway...